OpenJDK to develop JavaEE?

Question

I'm developing a JavaEE application and deploying it in Glassfish 3. I'm using Ubuntu 12.04, Eclipse for EE developers, and OpenJDK 6 JDK (package openjdk-6-jdk). No problems so far.

The problem is that everywhere where I look for information about using OpenJDK for Java EE development I found that it is supposed that OpenJDK is just Java SE, for example here, or here. Nevertheless, in my application I'm using javax.* a lot, and is working.

I've downloaded the source of OpenJDK 6 and I've found folder /jdk/src/share/classes/javax/ with a lot of classes, but some importants are missing like javax.servlet, javax.ejb or javax.faces.

Again, I don't have any other JDK besides the OpenJDK, nor GCJ or Oracle ones.

My question is: How is this possible? OpenJDK has support for the JavaEE APIs? Can it be used for that, or I need to download and install Oracle JDK? I'm not understanding something here?

Please note that Oracle list SDK for SE apart from SDK for EE, so I suppose they are different, right?

Kind regards

Answer 1

Your Glassfish server is the concrete Java EE implementation. Note that OpenJDK is a concrete Java SE implementation. Also note that whenever you download Java EE from Oracle site, basically all you get is Glassfish along with a bunch of documents and examples.

See also:

• What exactly is Java EE?